An Interview with Alexander Betts, Curator at the Ohio History Connection
Alex Betts is a Curator at the Ohio History Connection based at the OHC’s headquarters in Columbus, Ohio. He earned a MA with distinction in Museum and Artefact…
Tag: history
Ghettos
Ghettos. We commonly associate the term today with places like “effective social or ethnic ghettos, from the favelas of Brazil to the mostly black urban neighbourhoods of the…
Review of Bourdieu’s (2014) On the State
Review of Bourdieu, P. (2014). On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989-1992. P. Champagne, R. Lenoir, F. Poupeau, & M. C. Rivière (Eds.). London: Polity.…
Rubber Barons’ Abuses Live On in Memory and Myth
The Kukama people who live along the lower part of Peru’s Marañón River tell intergenerational myths that recollect the violence and trauma of the rubber era, which peaked in…
Aboot the Canadian "about"
Canadians — like the authors of anthro everywhere! — are pretty used to hearing English-speakers from the US and elsewhere in the world poke fun at our accents,…
Book Forum––Sabine Arnaud’s On Hysteria by Todd Meyers
Sabine Arnaud’s On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category Between 1670 and 1820 focuses on the socio-medical category before its better-known (and more heavily studied) late ninet…
Re/telling the story of Canada’s Residential Schools
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada investigated the impact of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools system on students, their families, and indigenous peoples across Canada more broadly. …
Climate Wars
Fiji’s human history is directly linked to the ebbs and flows of climate change—particularly of sea-level rise. Throughout the Pacific Islands, fluctuating environmental conditions resulting from…
Did Women and Children Exist in Prehistory?
Stone tools, like Acheulean hand axes, remain well-preserved for eons because they are stones first, tools second. Fired ceramics remain well-preserved for millennia because they are, in essence,…
Lao Camp Food (Part 2)
This is the second installment of a food journal I kept during several days in February camping with a bomb clearance team in Laos. If you missed my…
Gathering the Genetic Testimony of Spain’s Civil War Dead
The remains of many soldiers and citizens who died during the Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936 to 1939, have never been recovered. The development of genetic…
Valuing Aboriginal cultural knowledge in Western science
The relationship between Western science (scientists, government officials, etc.) and Aboriginal knowledge has often been rocky, with Westerners often only acknowledging the value of local indigenous …
Let’s Keep Arguing About Flags and Statues
The Confederate flag, which many people see as a symbol of America’s racist past, continues to spark debate. fauxto_digit/Flickr Last summer, the Confederate flag was finally taken down…
Canberra’s loss is Mānoa’s gain as the ANU walks away from decades of excellence
I do not normally write about my duties as a professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa on this blog, since the blog isn’t associated with UHM…
Lao Camp Food (Part 1)
I recently spent several days camping with a bomb clearance team in southern Laos. Quick history: Laos, per capita, is the most heavily bombed country on Earth. Between…
Rules of the Underworld
Since the beginning of Mexico’s drug war in 2006, approximately 80,000 people have been killed in organized crime–related incidents. More than 26,000 others are still missing. Despite attempts to…
Photography: Between Anthropology and History
Photography: Between Anthropology and History Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK 20-21 June 2016 Follow us on Facebook and Twitter @PHRC_DeMontfort Conference …
Stone Points to a Connected World
I was sitting in the brightly lit workroom at the Pitt Rivers Museum on a frigid day in November 2010, when I opened one of the bags that…
Reconciliation’s Waste: heritage and waste in post-apartheid South Africa
Portable toilets and urine on colonial era statues are reconciliations ruins, the things leftover that heritage helps to frame but yet cannot fully explain. As matter that remains…
Thompson on Sills, ‘Toxic War: The Story of Agent Orange’
The use of the defoliant Agent Orange by the United States is one of the most controversial actions of the Vietnam War. InToxic War: The Story of Agent…
Environmental historians get wasted: ASEH conference report
What’s my take on this torrent of waste at ASEH? I think it really signals a maturation of a second generation of waste scholarship in environmental history that…
The state of indigenous language and culture in Canada
The Canadian government’s program of cultural genocide in residential schools included the erasure of aboriginal languages. In Undoing Linguicide (an hour long audio documentary for CBC Radio’s Ideas…
Skeleton Sex Pots
The Moche, one of the world’s great ancient civilizations, occupied the northern coast of Peru from roughly A.D. 100 to A.D. 800. They produced beautiful ceramic vessels; hundreds…
The Great Chocolate Migration
Last fall, I was sipping Mexican chocolate at a chic little Singapore café. It was a local branch of a New York–based chain, which was started in Israel…